


The Astronauts

by JeckParadox



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Abandoned Work - Unfinished and Discontinued, Alternate Universe - Space, Astronaut AU, Gen, Space Stations, inspired by The Martian
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-10-09
Updated: 2015-10-10
Packaged: 2018-04-25 13:16:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 3,774
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4962007
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JeckParadox/pseuds/JeckParadox
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Two rival forces discover a planet that may hold the key to humanity's future, and so of course, the race is on. However, complications arose, and all four surviving astronauts have crash landed on different, much less habitable, worlds in the same system. Their only hope is each other, and their own skills.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Dave 1

Log 1:

Situation normal up here. Rose has decided that she's not going to get bored any time soon, and has already broken into her entertainment files. We're going to be spending a lot of time on Skaia, and we'll of course burn through every bit of entertainment we bring with soon enough, but Rose has decided she wants an early start. I am the wiser man, and also, only man, for light years, and as such, I am sitting in the corner bored out of my mind while Rose reads her illicit tentacle fantasies. Clearly, I have made the better decision. 

And so, with refusing to do anything else, I'm here in the corner of the ship dictating a log. But, oh well. 

We've been in space nearly eight months. Miss Lalonde has held up considerably well, but there's only so much cool one can keep when trapped in a large metal death trap accelerating at frankly unbelievable FTL speeds through the deadly abyss of slipspace, within the just as deadly abyss of actual space. We have successfully not murdered each other admirably. That is of course, the first, and most vital step of any long-lasting relationship. Trapped in a can or otherwise. 

The Seer 2 mission is, so far, all green. The unmanned Seer 1 mission successfully landed on the surface of Skaia, and beamed back promising results. Seer 2, of course, exists for the purpose of pre-colonization efforts. S1 sent back enough data to prove the planet was livable, and while the Dersite satellites deployed in S1 are transmitting, we have a decent idea of weather patterns and land formations and all that crap. From what we can tell, it's a freaking miracle, gift wrapped specifically for humanity to begin anew on. An Earth 2 to colonize in the name of Derse. Me and Rose will land our respective shuttles, deploy our bases, and start working our farms. Keeping in contact, and, with our main ship still in orbit, start coordinating the first of the terraforming and mass-seeding processes that'll turn Skaia into a _real_ Earth 2. 

It's a nine-month journey there, a three-year stay, and an eight-month journey back. (Ain't FTL great?) Because of slipspace BS, our journeys will only take about three months in real time. So, to the other side of the universe and back in under four years. Not bad. Took longer than that just to make the calculations to make the jump, but never mind that. 

I'm rambling now, but that's also situation normal up here.

Strider out.

Log 2:

Just left slipspace and everything's good. God damn did I miss the stars. Never thought I'd say that, after spending a few months pre-mission in the space station waiting for the jump calculations, but man, after seeing what's outside the window in slipspace, you're glad when the lights hold still. 

The star (LO-etc) that Skaia and the six other planets in the system orbit is well within view, though I can't see the planets with my naked eyes from this distance. Rose and I have been busy, checking on all the systems and checking our own navigational crap to make sure we ended up in the right place. We did. The Veil's (massive asteroid field making a semi-spherical dome around Skaia's sun) magnetism messes with Slipspace a bit, and so to be safe we came out of slip space before entering the field. 

It'll be a few weeks of travel the slow way, through real space and real time, but our ships are still Earth's finest, and really freaking fast. It'll be fine. Gives us time to pick up satellite information.

Rose is calling me over, Strider out.

Log 3:

Everything has gone to @#$%.

The slip-space portal opened back up behind us, and those Prospitian asshats came through with their own ship. Nearly @#$%ing ran into us on their way out. Their ship's bigger than ours, and has @#$%ing guns. We were meant to be a pre-colony mission, not fighting a war. Lalonde was beginning to talk about scrubbing it, and was sending out reports to back home as fast as she could. But it'll take at least a few days for the messages to get through slipspace and back to command. Our only way out right now is surrender.

I wouldn't feel so bad, honestly, if they hadn't literally hitched a ride on the back of our truck without permission. No, rather, they hitched their own, larger truck, to our own. Except that doesn't work, because they were just following our trail, not pulling us back-

Either way, they're here, and they cheated by piggiebacking on our jump. 

They were going to steal the @#$%ing planet, by cheating and following us. I'm dictating this as a matter of protocol, in case I die. 

Strider out.

Log 4:

Everything is even further within the @#$% than I dreamed possible. Layers and layers of BS. @#$%ception.

Their ship plowed into the asteroid field, using their shields to basically get through unscathed, but, and the situation's unclear on this, it exploded. I didn't do anything, Lalonde sure as hell didn't, and beyond that, we have nothing to fire at them with, but now they're sending missiles at us. We don't have escape pods, because there'd be no way for us to survive in slipspace all the way back in just little pods. FTL's been cracked, but that whole freezing-without-killing thing hasn't exactly been solved yet. At least not enough to implement.

Rambling. Sorry.

Lalonde decided to fake our deaths to get the Prospitians off our defenseless backs and take the shuttles. Me and Lalonde are both piloting one of the shuttles, as was planned, but we're leaving the main ship to drift. 

We only had a few frantic minutes to load as much as we could into the shuttles, but hopefully it'll be enough to let us survive. Here's the plan for the record; The ship will take a beating from the Prospitian missiles, and then explode. We take the shuttles and hide in the asteroid field. Prospitian's will leave us alone, and we circle around and land on Skaia using the main ship's nav computer (the thing's main computer is so well-protected the future wreckage could brush up against LO and still work enough to guide us there) and there we live off the land, quietly, until Derse sends reinforcements to save us. If we get noticed by Prospit's bigger ship, we'll just have to outright surrender. Prospit has infamously lax and humane prisoner treatment. The main issues is surviving long enough and becoming helpless enough for them to take you prisoner.

The missiles are incoming, and the shuttles are boarded and filled to the brim and ready to go. I'm going to have one last conversation with Rose, now, in case this plan doesn't go the way it might, and I end up dying a horrible flaming space death.

Strider out.

Log 5:

@#$%.

The Prospitians somehow took out the @#$%ing nav in the main ship. And the Comm. 

I have no contact with Rose, and no contact with anyone or anything else, in a shuttle with nowhere to refuel, with no way to contact Earth, and no way to return by itself. @#$%.

We'll have to wait for reinforcements. 

I'm sticking to the asteroids until the Prospit ship's at least out of view. 

From there, I'm going to pick a planet, pray it's Skaia, and land. The only other option is being stranded in space.

I should be able to survive. The shuttle has all this colony prep @#$%. Rose should too, considering. 

 

@#$%. @#$%. @#$%!

Strider out.

 


	2. Jade 1

Post Slipspace Log, Entry One:

The slipspace piggiebacking worked like a charm! Not that I had much to do with it, that was all the guys at home, but all the same, I'm glad it worked.

The Derse ship's absolutely tiny compared to ours, so forcing a compromise won't be entirely out of the question. Skaia's sun LO-413 is clearly visible from our position outside the asteroid field. The Veil. Seer 2 hasn't made any attempts at contacting us, and seems to be backing away to avoid hostilities. Everything looking good. 

The captain has just ordered everyone to strap in, we'll be pushing through the Veil. If we land on Skaia first, legally, the landing site and anywhere on the world we seed will legally be Prospit territory. The Seer 2 doesn't have enough shielding to force its way through the Veil like we do, so we'll definitely reach it first.

It's too early to declare it a mission success, but I have a good feeling!

>Transmission sent

PSL, E2:

I was wrong, very, very wrong. 

We got hit by a missile! It ripped through our shields and penetrated the engines of the ship. We've loaded onto the shuttles, the main ship's done for.

We don't even know what kind, or how it got past us undetected. There were no missile launchers on the Seer 2 that we knew about! The captain returned fire and destroyed Seer 2 before getting to his shuttle himself. But based on what little data we had, the missile didn't even come from that direction! Maybe we got hit by an especially-fast meteor. 

Me and John are taking the first two shuttles to deploy, as we're the youngest on the crew. Following will be Donovan and Mika. The fourteen of us will be leaving in groups of two, one pilot each to every shuttle.

>Transmission sent

PSL, E3:

The ship blew up! Everyone died, and we lost our Nav! It was supposed to be indestructible! Oh god, everyone's dead!

I can't really write right now i can barely think!

Me and John might be the only humans alive in this entire galaxy.

Okay, status report. Navigation is down, nothing I can do about that. The main pre-colony ship, Heir of Prospit, has been completely destroyed. Nothing I can do there either. The shuttle itself is not built for long-distance travel, meant only to drop down to the surface and return back once. There probably isn't enough fuel to accelerate all the way to Skaia, and without navigation, I have no idea where it is!

I'll have to accelerate in short bursts and simply free-float to Skaia. That'd be what John is doing. 

Oh, and communications are down. The satellite is orbiting Skaia itself, so the main ship was our only source of any kind of signal. It was also our only connection to Earth.

I'm going to try to make it to Skaia,  but first I need to focus on getting through the Veil. 

>Transmission failed to send

PSL, E4:

I've been trying to keep John within sight, and I know he's been doing his best to stick close to me, but this getting to be expensive. We can either use fuel making direction changes staying together, or we can use fuel trying to get to Skaia. The issue here, is that I don't have any way to tell him! If we're both aiming for the same place, it doesn't make any sense to stick together now.

So, I'm going to make sure he sees me, and then I'm going to blast away toward Skaia. If he sees that I'm not trying to stay close to him, he should get the basic idea!

>Transmission failed to send

PSL, E5:

I've lost sight of John. I hope he'll be okay! He's a really good pilot, so I know he'll be alright. We both have very good spatial senses, so if I go slow, I'm pretty good at navigating on my own. LO is always in sight, so it makes a pretty good becon! If I get into the right orbit around LO, I'll come within range of Skaia's satellite eventually! John will know to do the same thing. And once we're both in range at the same time, we'll be able to talk.

>Transmission failed to send

Post Event Log, Entry 1:

I've renamed the log. I couldn't bring myself to name it 'post explosion', or 'post mission failure'... It's been 24 hours since I lost track of John, and I have successfully left the Veil and entered...

um, the space between the Veil and the sun. The medium?

I have gotten very little sleep. 

I miss the days when I was a child plagued with narcolepsy. So much rest, even if there was all the bad stuff that came with it. Now I hardly get to close my eyes! It doesn't help that it's always ever-lasting night outside. But the constant, blaring, warnings from the shuttle do their job to keep me awake. 

The drugs help too. 

Based on my calculations, with no other complications, I should be able to get within Skaia's orbit in about two months. Two months of being in the shuttle, making constant little course adjustments based on my sense of where everything should be. I'm going based on eyesight. In space. I'm really afraid of dying. Luckily, the satellite around Skaia will be there to help me land.

>Transmission failed to send

PEL, E2:

I took a nap today and now I think I'm off course! I'm constantly moving, because I have to conserve fuel, so for now i'm just aiming at the sun! But when I went to the controls I was off kilter! I wasn't aiming perfectly straight, or the ship is spinning slightly, and I tried to tell it not to do that.

This will add even more time to the journey!

Gaaaaaaaaa

>Transmission failed to send

PEL, E3:

I'm going to die out here! I'm pointing at the sun again, but I'm facing it from a different direction from where I started my calculations! i need sleep, but whenever I sleep the universe tries to kill me! I think I'm going to go insane. 

What if John gets to Skaia without me? And because I'm an idiot I'll miss the planet completely, and be stuck up here for months and months until I starve and then I'll have to eat my own legs, and then I'll starve again, and John will never know what happened, and I flew off without him instead of sticking together!

>Transmission failed to send

PEL, E146:

Based on what calculations I can do, with the data brought with, and doing the math from scratch, approximately, as I can only really use my eyes to judge distances...

I should be within the orbit of one of the five earth-like planets circling LO. In order: LO-lar, LO-sak, LO-was, LO-faf, and LO-hac. Skaia, (LO-sak), is the second-closest planet to the sun, lying in the dead center of the goldilocks zone of LO. Which means it's warm enough to keep large amounts of liquid water on the surface, even more perfect than Earth. But any of the five planets would be acceptable, at this point. All of them are within the same range of life-sustainability. In fact, all five have confirmed biological material, according to the probes sent way back when.

If I land on any of them, I'll survive. 

Considering how quick the trip was, (IT WAS SLOW AS BALLS), technically, with all my errors along the way, I'm probably in the outer edge of the goldilocks zone. More than Skaia, it'll be LOfaf or LOhac, but I can't afford to use any more fuel. I have enough to make a few course corrections, but not enough to get to the other end of the goldilocks zone.

I'm just praying John will have made similar stupid mistakes, and somehow end up on the same planet as me, not that I'd be able to contact him anyway. >:(

oops, I'm not supposed to use emoticons in official logs. 

Well who cares! I'm stuck in space, my brother's stranded, and everyone else in every direction for a billion billion miles is dead!

:p

>:D Take that Prospit space agency! Your precious log, defiled with adorable tiny faces.

oh @#$% that's a planet, gotta go

>Transmission failed to send

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


	3. Rose 1

Log 149

Today I spent about three hours practicing on my violin, before returning to the cockpit to check the course. I ate four protein packs and several vitamins more than normal, as I was feeling sluggish. 

Lalonde out.

Log 150

I have finished, officially, reading through all of the literature on the hard drive. This will be a long few years. No course correction were necessary. No ill affects from too many protein packs from yesterday, but I must remember not to indulge.

Lalonde out.

Log 151

Three course corrections, small ones, were necessary. I have identified each of the planets by day-since-despair 46, however, there are issues regarding the fuel supplies. More course corrections were needed than first calculated. I've managed to make it to Skaia's orbit with the data I have, but I came too late. My options are to either use nearly all my remaining fuel, any unexpected corrections not accounted for, and go around the sun to reach Skaia, or I could wait only a few more days, and make a confirmed landfall on LO-lar. The atmosphere will not be breathable, and the temperature variation will push the tolerances of the machinery, but it will also mean survival. And more importantly, for the sake of my health, mental and physical, the chance to get out of the shuttle.

Lalonde out.

Log 152

LO-lar is the brightest of the stars, when looking out the window. It's a bright blue color, with vague gold splotches that were probably the clouds. LO-lar is in a perpetual state of storming, rapidly heating and cooling, it's atmosphere being both incredibly dense and very transparent. 

It will be my home, for a time. 

Lalonde out.

Log 153

LO-lar is within acceptable range, and once I finish my daily log, I will land on its surface. I'm getting some weak transmissions from probes still buried on LO-lar, and I shall be aiming for them when I land. They may be useful, and they'll also at the very least tell me the conditions of the surrounding area. 

Lalonde out.

Log 154

In a small breach of personal protocol, I am making a second log entry within the same twenty-four hours.

I have been trained for years in the piloting and operation of all the equipment we will be using over the course of the mission. Dave and I both. We're practically siblings, after all the time we've spent together. I hope he is doing all right. However, I don't think he'll run into too much trouble. The landing was very smooth, despite the differences in the atmosphere, Derse shuttles are very well equipped, and very strong. 

I went outside after deciding it was safe, and physically surveyed the area. The vast majority of the planet is ocean, which, like Earth's oceans, are primarily water, and similarly, will also make me violently ill if I were to try to drink any of it unpurified. I've landed the shuttle near the center of a small archipelago of bare, chalk-white islands.

The clouds are absolutely beautiful, and the sunlight passes through them and hits the multicolor mixture of the ocean in ways that make the light bounce and refract in ways that are stunning. Once Skaia is properly colonized, LO-lar will most definitely become a popular intersystem tourist destination.

Lalonde out.

Log 155

The nights come quickly, and the days pass quickly as well. A single rotation of the planet is about five hours. In the brief nights, the temperature shoots down quite a bit, and the storms get worse, going from a constant pleasant rainfall to something more chaotic. 

The shuttle can take this kind of stress easily, but I do have a time limit. If I wish to stay, or at least, decide the shuttle will stay on the planet, it will be perfectly functional as a base of operations, and will keep its internal systems running quite well on the planetary surface, and it's shells will be able to take the punishment for decades without needing replacement.

But within three years, I am sure that it will no longer be space-worthy. An especially bad storm could cut that time limit to one year. 

Lalonde out.

Log 156

Small pink-colored animals climbed onto the island to sun themselves. Pictures and more detailed zoological anyalysis is in the science files. Experimentally, I captured one and brought it inside for testing. They are nervous, vaguely intelligent creatures. I was only able to do a few tests, but as I do not have the resources to spare for a pet, and I'm not quite yet in the right set of mind to start hunting the local potentially sentient fauna, and analyzing every part of them for something usefully edible, I let it go unharmed. 

Poor thing was terrified.

Lalonde out.

Log 157

The pink animals are sunning themselves once more, but now dash for the water in a mad rush upon the air lock activating. They float in the water and watch me carefully whenever I am outside the shuttle. The turtles apparently fear me. If they do prove edible in the future, and a necessary food source at that, it seems that they will be more difficult to catch.

Lalonde out.

Log 158

I spent the day going over our supplies. The shuttle itself has a directory of everything that is supposed to be on it, but the extra supplies you and Dave rushed onto the shuttles has not yet been properly looked over. It's best that I know exactly what I'm working with.

Lalonde out.

Log 159

I have sacrificed one of the shuttle's drone-satellites. There is no knowing if Seer 2 is absolutely scrubbed, and so I've been cautious with mission-critical supplies. Although I have no idea how we might still accomplish what we need to do without the necessary components from the main ship, I've still been prudent, just in case.

Drone-satellites are very valuable, and will be necessary to track conditions on Skaia during the terraforming process.

But I have decided I'll need to know when and where the worst storms will hit.

Lalonde out.

Log 160

The first week of my stay on LO-lar has been exceptionally fortunate. I am quite relieved to have ground to walk on, and I will never be able to become bored with the brilliant views of the sea and sky. 

I wish Dave was here.

Perhaps a pet could be beneficial to my mental health. I shall analyze the turtles, as I've taken to calling them, further in the coming weeks if nothing more critical comes up.

Lalonde out.

**Author's Note:**

> Just saw/read the Martian and feeling inspired. Unfortunately, I know nothing about physics, botany, or anything about being an astronaut. So, don't expect much hard science out of this, expect a *lot* of science fiction instead.


End file.
